Paradox Bound: A Novel

by Peter Clines

“Is it significant somehow?”

  “Maybe. Like I said, I’ve lived here my whole life. Probably gone past this place two or three times a week, every week. And you know what?”

  She raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “I’ve never seen anyone working here. Not fixing windows. Not painting it. Not mowing the lawn or raking leaves or shoveling the steps.” He cast his gaze back and forth over the building again. “I think I never really looked at this place—none of us ever looked—because it never attracted attention. It went out of its way not to attract attention.”

  Harry took in a slow breath. “And you think the dream’s in there.”

  “Yeah.”

  She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel.

  He shrugged. “I’m open to a better idea.”

  “No,” she said. “No, I think…you’re right.”

  Eli and Harry slipped out of the car and walked to the edge of the parking lot. They took a few clumsy steps over the snowbank and set their feet down on the road. Eli glanced both ways, suddenly aware he had no idea what day of the week it was in Sanders. He hadn’t noticed many cars in either church parking lot, so not Sunday. He looked over at the back of the Silver Arrow and saw a few cars and two pickups. A usual weekday lunch crowd for the restaurant, even in the winter.

  They reached the base of the broad wooden staircase that stretched up to the Founders House. Sixty-six steps, split by two large landings. A childhood memory flashed in his mind—racing up and down the staircase with his friends.

  They stood at the base of the stairs and looked up at the mass of clapboards and windows and old shutters.

  Harry crossed her arms and took three deep breaths, pushing each one out between her lips as a cloud of steam.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m a little overwhelmed,” she said. “This…this is it. We’ve done it. The dream’s in there. I can almost feel it.”

  Eli took in a breath of his own. The cold air prickled at his skin. Or maybe it wasn’t the air. He looked at the broad wooden staircase leading up to the Founders House.

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “It’s kind of bizarre. All those years I was looking for you, and the thing you were looking for was sitting here the whole time, right under my nose…”

  She glanced at him. He stared up at the building, lost in thought. “Eli?”

  “Sorry. It’s just…” He blinked and looked at her. “I just had a bit of déjà vu. Didn’t Truss say something like that? Being right under their noses?”

  “I believe so,” she said. “But he was talking about hiding from the faceless men.”

  “Right.” The conversation floated up to the top of Eli’s memories. “He said he was so well hidden he’d set up a business right under their nose.”

  “And then they shot him dead.”

  Eli nodded slowly and looked at the staircase again. He remembered being a kid, riding bikes past those steps with Josh and Corey, making little-kid bets, daring each other to run up to the stairs. But none of them ever made it to the second big landing.

  None of them got that close to the Founders House. Not even Zeke or his idiot friends. Nobody.

  He remembered something sprawled in the dust. The bad house in a 1960s desert town. Cobwebs draping back and forth across it like threads.

  Stretching back and forth like strings.

  “Oh, no,” he murmured.

  “What?”

  Eli took her arm and stepped back into the street. “We have to go,” he said. “I think…I think I’ve made a mistake. A really, really bad mistake.”

  “What?”

  He took another step back, pulling her with him, his gaze still focused on the Founders House. Nothing stirred in the building. The windows stayed shut, the drapes hung still. It loomed silently over them.

  “Eli, what is it? Is this the wrong place?”

  “This is very much the wrong place,” he said. “We need to get back to Eleanor.”

  “Why?”

  “Right under their noses,” he said. “John told me about false positives when you search. Finding people who were influenced by the dream before it vanished rather than after.”

  The sounds of traffic grew in the distance.

  “All the strange time effects in Sanders,” Eli said, “they’re a false positive. This isn’t where the dream is. It’s where the dream was.”

  They reached the far sidewalk and Harry shook her head as they reached the snowbank. “No,” she said. “It can’t be. Before it vanished, it was still being guarded by the—”

  She took in a sharp breath. Her wide eyes stared up at the house the founders had built. “Pissbucket,” she hissed.

  They were in the parking lot now, less than a hundred feet from Eleanor, backing away from the sprawling old structure. The sound of engines filled the air. A distant growl.

  Eli looked back up at the Founders House, pictured the town in his head, tried to imagine the path the sound would take between all the buildings. “Run,” he said.

  They reached Eleanor just as the Hudson Hornet blasted around the corner of the Silver Arrow, shoving air out of its way and creating a wall of pressure that rattled the restaurant’s windows. It rushed up Front Street and skidded to a stop across the entrance to the parking lot, spraying a wave of slush into the air.

  Then another Hornet came around the corner. And another. Eli glanced back as he ran around Eleanor’s engine. A fourth slick black shape roared down the hill. Its engine screamed as the driver downshifted.

  He threw himself onto the bench as Harry landed behind the wheel. Eleanor’s engine revved. The Model A’s tires squealed on the pavement as the car shot forward. Harry slalomed through the snowy grove of parking meter posts.

  Behind them engines growled. Eli heard the synchronized thunk of four cars shifting gears. Tires shrieked on the pavement as they spun up to full speed.

  The swarm of Hornets launched themselves after Eleanor.

  36

  The Model A shot into the narrow passage between Sanders Craft & Fabrics and the old storage center. Eleanor’s running boards grazed one wall and spit out white sparks. “Go left,” shouted Eli as Eleanor burst out of the alley across from the cinema.

  Harry spun the wheel hard. She downshifted, slammed her foot on the gas, and the tires grabbed the street. The Model A threw itself forward, and Harry jerked the wheel just before sideswiping a parked car.

  Engines growled around them. Cars blocked the far end of the alley. Tires squealed on pavement. Sounds echoed back around the Silver Arrow.

  “Through town,” Eli said.

  They raced down the same streets they’d traveled just half an hour ago. Harry’s gaze flitted to the mirrors. “Where to next?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s your town! How do we get away from them?”

  Someone on the sidewalk shouted at them to slow down. Instead, Harry cut the corner by the pizza restaurant, making another car screech on its brakes and skid in the snow-covered street. The Model A flew past the fire station and…

  They heard the growls, closing fast. Before they reached the end of the block, Eli looked back and saw the first of the Hudson Hornets roar around the corner, barely two hundred feet behind them. The black car fishtailed, its tires spraying slush across the storefronts.

  A hand came out of the driver’s side with a pistol and fired two quick shots in their direction. Something whizzed past Harry’s window and yanked at her hair. She shrieked.

  “They’re close,” Eli said

  “Not close enough, thankfully. Right or left?”

  Eli saw a dozen yards between the Model A and the T-intersection. They were going in circles. Right or left? Right took them away from the Founders House, left took them toward—

  “Left!” he spat out. “Churches. Loaded with history.”

  Harry took the corner, swinging around a little silver import. Eleanor leaned to the side, close to tipping, but lev
eled out as they raced forward.

  At the far end of Church Street, a black shadow swung into view and roared toward them.

  “Hang on,” said Harry. She leaned into the steering wheel as Eleanor rushed forward. Eli braced his feet.

  The Hornet filled the road. The growl of its engine shook the air. The driver—a faceless man in some kind of clear animal mask—reached an arm out the window and fired four quick shots at the Model A, one after another. The cap of the gas tank sparked. The windshield spiderwebbed out a high corner.

  Eli braced for impact.

  Right between the churches, Eleanor hit a thin patch of history spread across the road. The tires spun on the pavement. The snowbanks vanished. Harry steered into the skid and let the car slip back ten, twenty, thirty years, at least. Then she hit the gas, the tires caught, and they rushed forward.

  She let her foot off the accelerator. The Model A bounced twice before getting a good grip on the dirt road. A stone bounced up to hit the undercarriage as the car squished through a dark patch of half-dried mud.

  “Where…when are we?” asked Eli.

  Only three other cars in sight, one of them parked just off the road. She glanced back and saw a fourth car parked in front of the solitary brown church. Most of them looked closely related to Eleanor.

  “Mid-’30s,” Harry guessed. “Maybe ’40s, the way this town is. I was just trying to get away from them.”

  She turned right at the end of the road, away from the Founders House and into a residential area. Lots of small houses, not much more than three-room bungalows. Two of them had picket fences out front. A pair of large Victorians bookended the street.

  Eli looked back. “Did we lose them?”

  “Maybe one or two of them. For a few minutes. They know where we slid, so there’s only so many whens to check before they can be certain.”

  “I don’t recognize any of these houses,” he said.

  “Perhaps we slipped back further than I realized.”

  A roar echoed up over the buildings. The mechanized growl of an angry beast appearing on the road at speed. One, maybe two of them. Eli heard a distant scream and the growl of acceleration.

  “Pissbucket,” muttered Harry. She stepped on the accelerator. Eleanor lunged forward again.

  “I think the state line’s up ahead,” said Eli.

  “Town and state line? That’s good. Lots of history there.”

  She drove past the line and into New Hampshire. Then she pulled hard on Eleanor’s wheel, made a bumpy turn across the dirt road, and raced back the way she’d come.

  “Never go in straight lines?”

  Harry nodded. “If the faceless men track us again, they’ll be going the wrong way. We’ll be a mile or three ahead before they get turned around.”

  Eleanor bore back down on the line. Stones and grit sprayed from beneath the Model A’s tires. The gears whined and the engine—

  Coughed. One sputter. But it hit just as they reached the town line, and without the momentum she’d planned on, their skid through history became a gentle glide.

  Eleanor fell short.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not sure.” Harry looked at cars, license plates, trying to find something, anything, that would tell her when they’d ended up.

  “Left up here,” he said. “Farther from the Founders House.”

  She turned onto an even less-developed street with spaced-out little houses sitting far up from the road. As she did, the engine coughed again. It kept hacking as Eleanor began to lurch. “Oh, no,” said Harry. “No, no, no…”

  “What?!”

  The red-orange light flared on the dashboard, a tiny warning beacon. The needle of the fuel gauge rested below the E. A flat line. Completely dry.

  “No, no, NO!” She smacked her hands against the steering wheel. “Come on, Eleanor. Just a little more, girl. We just need you to give us a little—”

  The engine sputtered twice and the car lurched forward again past a small house. It gave a final, wet cough and died.

  37

  “Pissbucket!”

  Harry worked the steering wheel back and forth, coaxing another twenty feet out of the car, getting a little more momentum from the slight slope of the road. The Model A rolled along the road for another thirty yards. Then, finally, she guided it onto the shoulder. The tires crunched on the gravel and dirt.

  Harry and Eli lunged up and out of the car before it settled. She reached across to the gas cap; he ran for the spare tank. “It took another hit,” he shouted from the back. “It’s almost empty.”

  “Consarn it!” Harry growled. She leaned across the hood, twisting to keep her coat between her chest and the hot cowling, her arms trembling as her hands gripped the gas cap. She twisted, but it refused to budge. Her fingers felt a gouge along the back edge. Half gouge, half dent.

  Eli leaned around the back of the car. “Maybe having a bright-red target on the back of the—”

  “Get the tools,” she snapped. “That hit jammed the cap.”

  She heard the trunk open, and a moment later Eli ran forward with the toolbox. She snatched it out of his hands, and he took her place, reaching across the hood to try prying the cap open.

  “Leave this to me,” she said, flinging the toolbox open. “Go find us some water.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere!” she snapped. “It’s your town. Go!”

  He dashed back, grabbed the tank, and ran for one of the houses.

  Harry pushed a few items aside and pulled out the big pipe wrench. Her thumb spun the wrench wider and wider as she stepped up onto the running board and stretched over the hood. She fit it around the gas cap and pulled.

  The cap didn’t budge.

  She pressed her knees against Eleanor’s side and heaved. She leaned her shoulders back and levered all her weight against the car. “Turn, you useless thing,” she snarled.

  The cap didn’t budge.

  Harry tightened her grip on the wrench and threw herself back. Her shoulders throbbed with each yank. Her fingers ached.

  On the fourth yank, the cap shifted.

  “Yes!” She swung the pipe wrench, tightened it again, and this time it turned easier. Still stiff and rough, but it moved.

  As she did the faint rattle of sprockets and chain came from the Model A’s rear, followed by the light crunch of something biting into the dirt and rocks. Too small to be a car. To be one of them.

  “Hey,” said a high-pitched voice. “Whatcha doing?”

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, thought Harry. She shot a quick look at the back of the car.

  A little towheaded boy with a bicycle stood near Eleanor’s rear bumper. He had the mop of uncut hair common to children from a dozen eras. Seven or eight years old, tops, dressed in faded jeans and a striped T-shirt. Maybe the 1970s or ’80s? An oversized backpack hung off his shoulders. He’d probably grow into it in another year or two.

  Assuming the faceless men didn’t kill him as a witness. Or worse.

  She tossed the wrench aside, grabbed the cap in her hands, and twisted it loose.

  She had to stay focused. The child had to go. Quickly, quietly, without causing a fuss.

  Harry stepped down off the sideboard, the cap clenched in her hand. “Kind of busy here,” she said. “You should head on home.”

  “Is something wrong with your car?”

  Harry nodded. “Just out of fuel,” she said. She reached over and gave Eleanor’s hood a few awkward pats. “We’ll be on our way soon, hopefully.”

  The little boy spun to point back the way they’d both come from. The backpack swung on his shoulders as he did. “There’s a gas station in town,” he said. “They can help.”

  Harry shook her head. “No, thank you,” she said. “I’ve only got a few minutes to get back on the road.”

  The boy seemed to ponder this, then came up with a new idea. “I could go get some gas for you,” he said, waving an arm at the bike. “I’m really fa
st.”

  “I don’t need gas,” said Harry. “My partner’s off taking care of things.” She looked over her shoulder and tried to figure out which one of the houses Eli had gotten off to. Then she looked back, and her gaze drifted past the boy to the road. No sign of the Hudson Hornets yet, but they had to be close. She flexed her fingers around the gas cap. “You should get out of here, child.”

  “I live right over there,” the boy said, pointing past the car. “It’s okay.”

  “It isn’t,” Harry told him. “You should head home. Bad things are coming.”

  The boy followed her stare to look down the road, but lost interest. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Harry.” Had that been a growl in the distance? No, just a motorcycle. Maybe an old dirt bike. Loud, but without the power of the Hudson Hornet’s engine. “Now, go home.”

  The boy kept talking, but she ignored him. It had been at least eight minutes now since Eleanor had stalled. The faceless men couldn’t be that far behind. She passed the gas cap back and forth between her hands and wondered what was taking Eli so…

  Wait.

  She stared down at the little blond boy. Her voice caught. “You’re…Eli?”

  The little boy leaned back. “Yeah?”

  Harry dropped to her knees and grabbed his small shoulder. She could see it all at this level. The eyes. The chin. The cheekbones hiding under a thin layer of baby fat. “Oh my God,” she said. “Look at you! You…you’re so cute.”

  Little Eli’s face wrinkled up.

  “I’m so sorry,” she told the little boy. “This is just…this is a complication. Or it could be. It’s a good thing you’re not here right now.”

  She looked over his shoulder to the road. “You really need to go,” she said. “Go now. Run home and don’t talk to anyone. Don’t even look at anyone. Especially if they’re carrying a big water tank.”

  Little Eli cleared his throat. “I have water.”

  Harry froze. Her grip tightened on Eli’s shoulders and she looked him in the eye. “You what?”

  “Water,” the boy said. “I’ve got some if you’re thirsty.” His shoulders wiggled under Harry’s hands, and when she let go the backpack slid to the ground. He slid out a small thermos decorated with the worn-down image of a red-and-blue mechanical man.